AMHERST, Mass.—David Mayhew, Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, will deliver a talk titled “American Presidential Elections: The Historical Perspective” at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 26, at Amherst College’s Pruyne Lecture Hall. The discussion is free and open to the public.

Mayhew’s research concerns U.S. legislative behavior, U.S. political parties and U.S. policymaking. He is the author of several influential books on American politics, including Party Loyalty Among Congressmen; Congress: The Electoral Connection; Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals; Placing Parties in American Politics; Divided We Govern; America’s Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through Newt Gingrich; and Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre. He has been an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hoover National Fellow, a Sherman Fairchild Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a member of the American Political Science Association National Council, a member of the board of overseers of the National Election Studies of the Center for Political Studies and is currently a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2000 to 2001, he was John M. Olin Visiting Professor in American Government at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford in England.

Mayhew earned his doctorate from Harvard University in 1964. In 2004, he received the Samuel J. Eldersveld Award for lifetime achievement from the American Political Science Association.